Left, right invoke Martin Luther King Jr. to their own ends
By: James Hohmann August 26, 2013 05:05 AM EST

What would Martin Luther King Jr. think of gays, drones and Republicans?

It’s anyone’s guess, of course.

But that isn’t stopping groups spanning the ideological spectrum and representing an array of interests from seizing on the 50th anniversary of his march on Washington to champion their individual causes — no matter how tenuous the nexus to King’s legacy of battling racial injustice might seem.

Everyone wants a piece of the King action, which started Saturday with a march retracing the 1963 route and continues Wednesday with a day of speeches commemorating the civil rights icon at the Lincoln Memorial.

Gun control advocates who have been protesting Florida’s so-called stand your ground laws trekked north to participate. Advocates for D.C. statehood held a rally at the District of Columbia War Memorial. The Republican National Committee is hosting a luncheon Monday to discuss the party’s outreach to African-Americans.

Even Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban hosted auditions in Washington last week for minority small business owners to be on his TV show, “Shark Tank.” Organizers explained that it corresponds with “a new shift in the movement from civil rights to economic rights.”

Martin Luther King III, the civil rights leader’s oldest living child, said he’s not concerned that all of this dilutes his father’s core message. His goal this week, he said, is “to arouse a new coalition of conscience” that can counter the energy of the tea party movement.

King III said the recent Supreme Court ruling dismantling a key part of the Voting Rights Act, as well as rising income inequality and the Trayvon Martin shooting, have reminded communities of color that they need to protest in the streets and lobby Congress for action.

“This is not a commemoration, but it is a continuation of the movement that my father helped lead,” he told POLITICO.

But the run-up to the anniversary has exposed disagreement over what exactly continuing the movement means.

Alveda King worries that tying specific social causes to her uncle diminishes his overarching significance. She said he was “an imperfect human who served a perfect God” and wants the celebrations to focus on a unifying message of love.

“There are so many definitions of, ‘What does civil rights mean?’ … It’s a natural thing that people would say, ‘Surely this is what Martin Luther King was marching for,’” said Alveda King, who has her own ministry and is active in a group called Priests for Life. “Fifty years have showed us that fighting for causes will not unite us.”

The debate over whether King would have embraced gay marriage as the next front for civil rights, for example, is particularly tense.

The gay community has closely aligned itself with the tributes. Multiple events honor the late Bayard Rustin, who helped organize the 1963 march and was openly gay, and a coalition of more than 40 groups signed an open letter calling for “clear federal laws barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.”

“At the end of the day, what we’re really talking about here is marginalization,” said MacArthur Flournoy, the director of faith partnership and mobilization for the LGBT-focused Human Rights Campaign. “I see our communities coming together. We cannot afford to live in silos.”

President Barack Obama, of course, endorsed gay marriage last year, and the NAACP followed suit shortly after. But many African-Americans still oppose gay marriage. Grammy-winning gospel singer Donnie McClurkin was supposed to perform last weekend at a concert at the King Memorial but said he was uninvited by the mayor of Washington after a few activists complained that he once called being gay “a curse.”

King himself never spoke out firmly for or against gays. The Supreme Court did not even strike down laws banning interracial marriage until 1967. King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, said before she died that her husband probably would have supported gay rights.

University of Wisconsin history professor William Jones, who just published a book about the 1963 march, said King most likely wouldn’t have objected to the assortment of groups invoking him decades after his assassination.

“He was never somebody who restricted himself and his political positions very narrowly,” Jones said in an interview. “He consistently said that his position was not just about fighting for racial equality; it was fighting for a just society.”

And in an op-ed questioning whether King’s “message of unarmed truth” would be sanitized at this week’s memorials, PBS host Tavis Smiley wrote that it’s not a stretch to imagine King rallying behind any number of liberal movements — from expanded voting rights to the protest against drones — pressing to make headway today.

“Just as he condemned the use of napalm in the Vietnam War, he would surely condemn the use of drones in the murder of innocent civilians, especially women and children,” Smiley wrote in USA Today. “To presume that, at this 50th anniversary of the march, King would not address war, poverty, hunger, voting rights and the attacks on working-class Americans defies logic.”

The groups staking a claim to King’s message to buttress their causes run the gamut.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is trying draw attention to discrimination against Muslims, arguing that “Islamophobia is just the latest manifestation of the same intolerance faced by Dr. King and other civil rights leaders of his time.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and four other conservative senators, meanwhile, quoted King in a recent op-ed arguing for more school vouchers.

“Dr. King’s definition of ‘true education’ is reflected in the types of young men and women that parent-driven, locally controlled school choice continues to produce,” the men wrote for The Huffington Post.

And unions are linking their push for expanded collective-bargaining rights to King’s battle for civil rights.

NAACP Washington Bureau Director Hilary Shelton said King’s famous speech was as much about class as race. He noted that Native American and Latino delegations, including farm workers, came to Washington for the 1963 march.

“What we’re seeing now is a natural progression of the agenda that was being moved then,” Shelton said. “The original march was for jobs and freedom; … it was always about expanding the franchise to protect and expand opportunities for all Americans in our society.”

At an event at the National Press Club last week, low-wage workers suggested that King would have joined their fight for a higher minimum wage.

“Since the beginning, the cause of civil rights has gone hand-in-hand with the cause of organized labor,” United Steelworkers International President Leo Gerard said in a separate release. “They recognized then, as we do today, that the American Dream cannot be achieved without true economic justice, and that economic justice cannot be achieved until all workers have the freedom to organize.”

Presidential historian Richard Norton Smith of George Mason University said it is natural for individuals and groups of many different persuasions to lay claim to King. The civil rights icon, Smith said, genuinely inspired leaders of several big movements over the past half-century, from women’s rights activists to those who sought better accommodations for the disabled.

“Imagine American history if he had not lived, if he had not exerted the leadership role he did, if we had never heard of him,” said Smith. “There would have been a civil rights movement, but it would have been very different, and I’m not sure it would have, in the way it has, given rise to successive waves of human liberation.”